On July 5, Meituan and Taobao launched a lightning-fast order battle in the field of instant retail. This sudden traffic contest not only set a new order record, but also highlighted the importance of instant retail and e-commerce synergy. This article delves into the traffic logic, transaction conversion, and key battlefields behind this battle.
On July 5, instant retail broke out again in a secret and rapid order battle. The main targets are Taobao and Meituan.
Yesterday evening, many Meituan users suddenly received a number of 0 yuan exchange coupons issued by the platform, mainly concentrated in milk tea and coffee categories. Soon, hot search entries such as Meituan’s explosive orders, Tea Baidao explosive orders, and Meituan’s collapse began to appear.
Everything came suddenly. Some service providers described: merchants are confused, consumers are confused, riders are confused, and system R&D personnel are also confused. The service provider told us that at nearly 10 o’clock in the evening, they could still receive 6,000 orders in one minute.
Some industry insiders analyzed the reason for the platform’s order rush: Taobao Flash Sale previously proposed that July 5 was the order rush day, to reach the goal of 90 million or 100 million orders, and strive to surpass Meituan. So Meituan fought back.
The result of the order rush is: At 20:45 in the evening, Meituan Takeaway and Meituan Flash Sale released a battle report, and Meituan’s instant retail daily orders exceeded 100 million orders. At 22:54 p.m., Meituan, Meituan Takeaway, and Meituan Flash Sale released a battle report, and Meituan’s instant retail daily orders exceeded 120 million, of which catering orders exceeded 100 million.
The order rushing blitzkrieg has once again verified the easy order attribute of tea and coffee. We learned that until this afternoon, it was said that “some merchants were still fulfilling yesterday’s orders.”
It can be expected that with the beginning of summer vacation and the heating of summer, the summer promotion of instant retail will continue, and the order volume will continue to soar.
Taobao and Meituan’s demands are very clear. In order to continue to strengthen the consumption mentality of a large consumer platform, Taobao uses takeaway + flash sales to rush daily activities together, and several previous charges have verified the daily activity driving effect of takeaway on the APP. In order to keep the first mentality in the takeaway and instant retail industry, Meituan continues to cultivate the consumption habits of instant retail and strengthen its mentality of bringing everything home.
To truly realize the above demands, it is destined to open up a more critical third battlefield in addition to takeaway and wine tourism – how to synergize with e-commerce in terms of traffic, transactions and even the performance speed of some categories. We believe that this is also the core advantage of Taobao and JD.com compared to Meituan.
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At present, signs of a third battlefield have emerged.
First, the key is to open up the third battlefield
The traffic undertaking after the order is very important, which is closely related to the original intention of e-commerce giants to rush into the bitter business of instant retail from this year: the development of Meituan flash sales proves that instant retail can steal part of the e-commerce share; The development of JD takeaway has also proved that the use of takeaway can increase daily activity and even bring some e-commerce joint sales.
E-commerce platforms do instant retail, not only for traffic, but also to keep the share of some categories that originally belonged to e-commerce that may be robbed by instant retail because of “fast”, such as 3C digital small household appliances, alcohol, medicines, future pets, mothers and babies. At the same time, in order to prevent the consumer mentality formed by instant retail because of “fast”, it gradually penetrates into more categories, and cuts off more e-commerce share, such as clothing, alone (through self-operated or associate flash warehouses) or with offline retail stores.
Therefore, in addition to paying attention to how many orders are brought through milk tea and coffee, more importantly, based on these high orders and high traffic, to what extent the defensive counterattack in some cross-categories of instant retail and e-commerce, as well as the entire consumer entrance, has been achieved.
Specifically, it includes: how to drive more e-commerce increments to promote the drainage of takeaways; Can takeaway traffic drive more high-margin non-meal instant fulfillment?
The former requires traffic synergy between takeaway and e-commerce, as well as accurate product recommendations. At present, it is reflected on Taobao and JD.com APP, such as their respective instant retail is at the first-level entrance on the homepage, and the Taobao flash sale order page will appear e-commerce product recommendations. The dynamic display page of JD.com’s takeaway order also began to recommend more e-commerce products shortly after making takeaway.
The Taobao APP order page will display shopping orders and flash sale orders differentiated
Alibaba and JD.com executives have also affirmed the driving role of takeaway in APP traffic, daily activity, and e-commerce transactions in official occasions such as financial reports.
Of course, how much it can be driven in the end still depends on the ability of their respective platforms in e-commerce supply, price, and service, after all, the consumer mentality of each e-commerce company has been clear enough, takeaway drainage is not strong grass drainage, more cost-effective drainage, consumers will still carry out multi-platform price comparison when carrying out e-commerce consumption.
The latter is the two realization paths of instant retail that we are talking about, from far-field e-commerce to near-field leakage (the other is the upside down of offline stores), which is the way Taobao and JD.com have more basic advantages, and it is also the third confrontation that they and Meituan must open in addition to takeaway and wine tourism.
Second, offline stores are long-term street fights
The reason why we believe that the third confrontation of instant retail is more likely to occur in the far field to the near field, rather than the offline store flipping, is because the upturn itself is a matter that requires a particularly long cycle, and the overall progress is still slow to deal with countless small local stores, and the share has not reached the node where a brand merchant has strong demands and strong external investment.
The long-term participant in the upturn of offline stores is Meituan. Overall, Meituan’s supply structure in the field of instant retail includes three layers:
The first floor is the Little Elephant Supermarket, which mainly serves fresh food and some daily categories, and currently has more than 1,000 stores, and is the direction that Meituan will focus on in the second half of the year after the closure of Preferred. And with reference to the experience of Dingdong and Pupu, it is possible to achieve profitability through regional encryption in the future.
The second floor is the cooperative lightning warehouse, the category is mainly standard products per day, but most of the white labels are high, and the gross profit is high. Therefore, in the introduction of MINISO, the cooperative brand customizes the flash warehouse to supplement the brand supply.
The third layer is the offline store upturn. Including the offline stores of brands that are expanding, such as doing inventory data and joint marketing with Taobo. This part of the supply may lead to the road of customized lightning warehouses such as MINISO in the future. It also includes countless non-brand offline husband and wife stores, with the advantage of being ready-made, but the supply is outdated, scattered, and even has no price advantage.
A retail digital service provider mentioned that “in the future, a large number of non-standard supplies will still have to be completed by offline upturning”, and “offline upturning is street fighting”, which has a long cycle and is hard work, and it is also Meituan’s specialty.
After JD Second Delivery and Taobao Flash Sale have successively increased instant retail, they have also cooperated with some brands of offline stores, such as Heilan Home cooperated with JD Second Delivery; Taobao flash sale cooperation Aya Zhi and so on.
However, some industry insiders told us that when they cooperate with some clothing KA brands, they will encounter resistance from their respective e-commerce businesses to varying degrees, because the instant retail pallets come from offline and the performance belongs to offline, “which will be regarded as diversion by e-commerce.” In terms of the current overall participation in the industry, it is still concentrated in men’s clothing, children’s clothing, underwear and other standard products, as well as some offline stores with inventory.
3. What are the focus of competition in the third game?
Even so, for Taobao and JD.com, the way to combine with their own conditions and even give full play to their advantages is still to find a way for instant retail and e-commerce businesses to synergize in traffic, transactions and even the performance speed of some categories.
There are also some difficulties in this.
From this point of view, the role of takeaway on JD.com and Taobao is not only to attract new people and promote activity, but also to help them supplement more POI dimensional consumption information.
It is still difficult to have a grid supply of goods suitable for local grid needs, that is, to put the goods needed by local consumers within 3-5 kilometers in advance.
More importantly, on the basis of matching supply and POI, based on the judgment of the timeliness of performance in different time periods, dynamic capacity scheduling should be done.
In this way, the factor of performance timeliness can be accurately added to the product search and promotion logic.
For example, when a user enters a vague category term, the system has to determine whether to prioritize matching faster but potentially more expensive, or relatively white-label supply, or recommend a supply with a longer delivery time but better evaluation. The core is to search and present based on a comprehensive understanding of product characteristics, consumer demand, and performance timeliness.
At present, the search results of the three companies under the same term are significantly different.
Enter “beer” on the homepage of Meituan (cold beer is a drainage product of the recent major instant retail platforms), and three options will appear: rider delivery, express delivery, and in-store group buying.
Express delivery corresponds to the supply of “Meituan e-commerce”. After checking, the main body of Meituan e-commerce is the previous Meituan good goods. Tuan Haohu once undertook the vision of Meituan’s new flagship business, recruiting white-label merchants from the industrial belt, and then merged into Meituan Preferred due to poor development.
In the comprehensive screening, there are nearly 30 subdivision options under five categories: commodity price, merchant service, merchant quality, takeaway preferential activities, and delivery services.
Also enter “beer” on JD.com, and the default product flow is sorted as self-operated tomorrow delivery and self-operated second delivery. The comprehensive screening is also very rich, but service/discount priority, followed by custom price ranges, and then brand, which is very in line with JD.com’s emphasis on brand/service.
In the delivery time, it has been accurate to within 30 minutes, within 1 hour, within 2 hours, within today, and within tomorrow. The wine delivered in 30 minutes comes from Dingdong Grocery Shopping, FamilyMart, Seven Fresh, Jingdong Wine World, etc.
The search box on the Taobao homepage can still only search for e-commerce delivered by express delivery, as well as the next-day delivery of Tmall Supermarket, and the takeaway fulfillment is uniformly concentrated at the entrance of flash sales (takeaway).
This is because the basic capabilities of the three companies are different, so the weight and embodiment of the performance statute of limitations in commodity search and promotion are different. It is these differences that will lead to different directions in the third battlefield.
The biggest difference is of course Meituan, which focuses on the three-layer supply structure mentioned above, and at the same time explores the supply of e-commerce + express delivery through Meituan e-commerce.
The “express” option that appears in Meituan’s search for beer comes from Meituan e-commerce, which is the previous Meituan good goods
JD.com has JD Mall, Seven Fresh Food Mall, Seven Fresh Supermarket, as well as vertical JD Wine World and Maternal and Child Life Hall offline, as offline contact points. Theoretically, if more traffic synergy between the main station and the second delivery is realized, the growth of some offline vertical categories, such as wine, can be achieved.
JD Wine World is said to have grown well recently. In the homepage column of the JD.com APP, it is indeed seen that wine has become the fourth priority category, second only to recommendations, state subsidies, and books. JD Wine World is a business of JD Supermarket, which can be regarded as an e-commerce vertical that achieves growth driven by second delivery.
So by analogy, perhaps mother and baby may become the next fast-growing category.
Taobao’s advantage is the richness of brand supply, but the business composition is also more complex, and with Ele.me being assigned to the e-commerce business group, there may be more adjustments based on resource synergy in the future. Theoretically, Hema and Cainiao Station may be able to provide more support to Taobao flash sales, such as the existence of Cainiao Station as a front-end warehouse attribute to accurately undertake part of the e-commerce supply.
In any case, the three must find and clarify their own way to undertake high traffic, especially for JD.com and Taobao, which are actively attacking. JD.com chose the supply chain idea, Taobao’s big consumption platform idea has no problem, and the drainage effect is also there, and what needs to be further clarified is what to do next. The ongoing summer promotion and how to undertake the future Double 11 with flash sales are all nodes worthy of further attention.
